2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: White progressive analysis of politics is fundamentally broken. [View all]JCanete
(5,272 posts)alluring enough to some people to then deprive them of their own economic security and possessions, but only when they don't know that they can have something better. The point is the distraction...the misdirection. People don't just go..."er..hey now let me see, you want my house, and my teeth and my car and my kid's college fund...but you say I can kick some people of color when they're down? Sold!"
. That just isn't how racism works. Racism does work because people want to justify to themselves as much as to anybody, why they are going to take what they covet from other people. And when it is weaponized by people at the top against not just those minorities but against people within the "preferred race" as well, that is where we see a powerful effort to make sure people understand that the reason their economic status is getting more insecure is because of immigrants and welfare...etc.
So I disagree with you that economic anxiety has no relationship to the big picture. I haven't read Franks, but on the surface, his argument about the Democratic party looks entirely sound to me. Sure, when you get into the upper middle class and higher it starts to be more about colonialism than exploiting economic anxiety, because those people have to justify to themselves why they're living so large and other people are suffering so much...but what gets packaged and sold to the rest of us is "the reason we can't have nice things is those brown people."
So now, we are trying to make it all about racism first as the root rather than the flower over here, to the point where we are insisting that we should not peel people off from that GOP with an economic message that redirects their fear and anger where it belongs... that instead we are somehow going to combat their racism simply by saying "you're racist and that's bad, and we shun you." How could that possibly get through to them given the propaganda they've been fed? Enough of them don't even realize they're racist, and are not going to be lured by the clarion call that their parents who voted for Trump, and who they love, are bad, deplorable, people.
What we all seem to agree on is that capacitance for racism is the tool, and that demonizing marginalized communities is the tactic. It is the very reason that racism is so damn entrenched here. The people have been told a story and everything they see confirms it..anything that contradicts it is probably filtered right out. We can give them a message of hope that doesn't shit on any poor people or immigrants or minorities. We can give them their boogie man. The GOP and the media have already done the work of making people distrust the "liberal media." It's pretty damn foolish of us to be the ones that actually legitimize it. We should tell people "That's right, it shouldn't be trusted...because it's owned by mega-corporations...now when is the last time you've heard of a mega-corporation that wants to raise minimum wage and taxes on itself? Does that look like a liberal mouthpiece to you?"
We have to show people that the messaging is about the con. That means we can't ignore the money...we can't get to the economics later. It's the point. It's the reason.